Conspiracies, Science Denials & Hoaxes – Intro

This is an introduction to a series of posts I’ll be writing about conspiracy theories and science deniers. Before I begin, I have a couple of opening remarks:

[1] Some people use religion (usually the Bible), to “prove” their points. I will be using religion to answer these arguments. Sorry if that offends anyone, but that’s how it is. The Bible is a valuable spiritual guide, but to use it to disprove science or prove a conspiracy theory is to desecrate it. The Bible is to be used for growing spiritually, and to use as a teaching tool to help your fellow Believers grow spiritually. It’s never for shoving into people’s faces to support an argument.

[2] Conspiracy theorists and science deniers who refuse to read this upcoming series will prove my point. That’s your loss, not mine.

[3] If you think I reject ALL conspiracy theories out of hand, you’re wrong. I have no doubts at all that dirty dealings and public manipulation goes on in the upper political and corporate echelons of society.

It is alarming to me how many conspiracy theorists and science deniers there are on the internet. Science is more available to the masses than it’s EVER been, and people are reverting to medieval superstition.

I’ve come to the conclusion that many of them are unable to grasp the science. I don’t mean low IQ. They’re smart in other ways, but the science is above their heads. This makes them (subconsciously) feel inferior, so they cope by finding a way to feel superior. By associating with groups of like-minded people, they get a feeling of belonging and exclusivity. The funny thing is, they call people like me “sheeple” because I understand the science. But they are sheeple because they follow each other and reinforce each others’ ignorance.

Hofstadter (1966) noted that

…conspiracy theories help people comprehend complex events that are difficult to understand otherwise, by attributing these events to a powerful and evil enemy group. More generally, a desire to make sense of the world is a core motive underlying belief in conspiracy theories (see also Bale, 2007).

Since conspiracists are unable to participate in honest scientific disquisition, they use strawman arguments and cherry-picked data taken out of context and distorted beyond all recognition to make their “points”. They prefer ideology to facts. They’re not *just* uninformed; they are engaging in willful ignorance – and act proud of it. They rely on fake experts with illogical reasoning. No matter what kind of absolute proof you can show them that is contrary to their conviction, they believe that they’re right, and they will explain away the actual evidence, no matter how concrete it is.

I’m sure conspiracists are on all social media platforms, but the three I use are Facebook, YouTube and Quora, so that’s where I see them jump into a science-oriented conversation with deliberate trolling comments. Quora is where they get particularly ridiculous with questions designed to provoke arguments. I almost always ignore the ludicrous conspiracy posts I see on Facebook, because if I say anything at all to oppose their views, they fly into a blathering rant.

I don’t know if there are any actual stats, but most of the conspiracists and science deniers I run into are staunch Trump supporters. This is understandable, since Trump spoon-feeds them what they want to hear. I’ve found that they have about the most selective memories of anything I ever saw. They are so determined to uphold a rose-colored view of their hero, that they blame liberals or Democrats in general, or Biden in particular, for any negative effect resulting from any of Trump’s own actions while in office. (not all Trump supporters are conspiracists and science deniers. Some of my Trump-supporting Facebook friends are pretty wonderful people.)

I already covered the Covid vaccine issue. Blame the other guys all you want, but Trump did that.

Conspiracy theories, science denial and superstition are so intertwined, it’s hard to separate them. It’s certainly nothing new. Judging from the evidence of ritual and certain cave drawings and artifacts left behind by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they had their own superstitions. And from the time the first writing system was invented over 5000 years ago, to now, humankind has recorded thoughts, beliefs, and just about everything. We know much about the superstitions and conspiracies of past civilizations. In the future, I’ll be telling about many of these in great detail, but for now, following is a brief list of a few famous historical examples.  

During the year AD 64, the Great Fire of Rome erupted in the merchant district in a shop carrying flammable goods, destroying most of the city. Conspiracy theories spread like the fire itself, blaming both Nero and the Christian community for starting the fire. As a result, many Christians were crucified or burned alive by mobs.

  The famous mathematician and astronomer Hypatia taught at the University of Alexandria. Although philosophers (aka scientists), had been using math to predict eclipses for hundreds of years, when she did it, Bishop Cyril accused her of sorcery because she was “predicting the future”. He got his congregation so riled up against her, that one day a group of them attacked her in the street and brutally murdered her.  

When the Bubonic plague spread across medieval Europe, thousands of Jews were massacred and slaughtered by so-called Christians who believed they caused it.  

We all know about the Puritan witch trials, in which many innocents, including children, were imprisoned or executed for supposedly practicing witchcraft.  

Then there were the McCarthy Hearings, spawning conspiracies across the country. Half the population was eying the other half with suspicion, certain that millions of secret communist spies were going to rise up and overthrow the United States government and establish a communist state.

People develop superstitions in an attempt to understand the world around them. Superstition evolves into conspiracy theories and science denial. Conspiracy theories and science denial results in the spread of fears and alarmist scaremongering.  

In the course of some debates I’ve participated in, conspiracists have had the audacity to say I am not a critical thinker. They don’t even know what critical thinking is. Critical thinking depends on analyzing empirical evidence, which they refuse to do.

Conspiracists come up with stupid stuff, like when moon-landing deniers sarcastically ask how Nixon could use a landline phone to call the astronauts on the moon. You can give them a hundred links showing it was based on technology developed decades before that incident, but they won’t even look at the links. That is subjective thinking, the OPPOSITE of critical thinking. Subjective thinking does not have to be provable or grounded in fact. Hello! Is your cell phone able to make calls to landlines, and receive calls from them? Your mobile phone uses radio waves to send and receive calls!

Those who refuse to check the facts ARE NOT CRITICAL THINKERS!   Give them all the facts you want, they just get defensive. Their response will be just to say, “That’s wrong”, but they are completely unable to give any intelligible reason why it’s wrong. This is proof that they don’t even understand the subject well enough to give any rational systematic reasons for why they are right.

And then there’s ridiculous declarations like, drug companies don’t try to find a cure for cancer so they can make money. What kind of illogic is that? More and more types of cancer are being cured faster and faster. New and better and more efficient treatments are being developed all the time. That branch of science is rapidly advancing. Amazing new breakthroughs are being made all the time. Until relatively recently, cancer was always a death sentence. Now it has a good chance of being cured. And at the rate medical science is advancing, in the not-too-distant future cancer will be a thing of the past. 

Conspiracists will say, wake up! Look around and see what’s really going on. But they can’t back up their claims. All they do is quote each other. If they give a link, it’s just to some random person saying whatever it is. Many times, I have traced conspiracies back to something some unknown person said on Reddit or something, or even back to a satire site. You know, the kind that have a disclaimer saying something like, this is an entertainment site and all the articles are fiction. Or they’ll take something so completely out of context, no thinking person would fall for the idiocy. Some of the craziest conspiracies of all are the ones lifted from fictional books and movie plots.  

It drives me bananas when I see memes getting shared to prove that hoaxes aren’t hoaxes. Sometimes it’s a real photo captioned with wrong information. Sometimes it started out as a real photo, but it’s been edited to make it look like something it’s not. And the videos! Videos are edited to make someone sound like they said something that they never did. Sometimes clips will be taken from two or more different videos, then spliced together to make a person appear to say something that they never did. Conspiracists are so determined to believe false information, that they just take it all at face value.

Conspiracists will say they “study” and “research”. No, they don’t. They just read what other people are saying and believe what they want to believe. Sometimes they’ll reference a “scientist”, and say, see, a scientist agrees with this. But if they did real research, they would find out either that person doesn’t actually exist, or they do exist but they’re not a scientist. Worst of all is when they assign a quote to a genuine scientist, but that scientist NEVER SAID IT.  

One example of a psuedo-science hoax quoting a real expert is the Gosford Glyphs as presented by Ancient Aliens. The claim was that Egyptologist Ray W Johnson translated the glyphs, and the show gave a long story about what he supposedly said that the glyphs said.

 
Johnson responded:

“I have never translated any faux Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in Australia (those rock inscriptions were clearly not done by any ancient Egyptians). That Ray Johnson, whoever he is/was, has/had no association with the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, and I suspect is not an Egyptologist”.

But it gets better. The Gosford Glyphs never existed until 1983. Archaeologists had scoured the park before that looking for indigenous rock carvings and never found anything. People were living in the area, and it was a favorite hiking spot. The glyphs suddenly began showing up in 1983, and every time anyone looked, there were more of them.  Then in 1984, Park Rangers caught red-handed the man carving them. Ancient Aliens conveniently never mentioned that part.  

There are many, many similar examples of hoaxes that are so easily disproved, but the people who religiously watch shows like Ancient Aliens and read pseudo-science websites take it all at face value and never question the validity of hoaxes and conspiracy nonsense.  

So how are people so easily fooled?   Science deniers pick and choose which aspects of science they want to believe in. (Again the opposite of critical thinking and logic). They find it easier to shape “facts” around what they want to believe, rather than shape the truth around concrete facts.   The self-proclaimed “experts” fool their followers by loosely connecting a slew of random points that trick the brains of the gullible into formulating correlations that don’t exist. This is the classic modus operandi of con men to deceive their targets. Conspiracy peddlers throw around a lot of big sciency-sounding words, and superimpose a lot of fiction on a few facts. Circular arguments by the presenter ensures that the susceptible brain will make invalid connections. There’s a word for that: ap​ophenia – the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things

Science denial can take interesting turns.

Adherents will accept any aspect of science that agrees with them, and reject other aspects of that same science when it says something they don’t agree with. The following example illustrates a phenomenon I’ve been observing for decades:  

An archaeology team makes a discovery that proves a narrative in the Bible is true.  

The denier will say, See! That proves the Bible is true!  

The same archaeology team, using exactly the same techniques and technology as before, makes another discovery that proves a narrative in the Bible is false.  

The same denier will say, HOAX! False science! Science is always trying to prove there’s no God!   The denier will then go on with the assertion that those archaeologists must be atheists.  

In fact, there’s an automatic assumption that any scientists are atheists when they disagree with conspiracies, hoaxes and pseudo-science. Well, guess what? Scientists run the same gamut as everyone else- atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, lukewarm Christians, and even born again Christians leading a Christ-centered life.  

Law enforcement, medicine, and many science fields, including archaeology, use a great deal of overlapping technological devices, methods and forensic techniques. In fact, much technology invented by one field is picked up by others because it works so well. It makes no sense that people will trust the police to solve a case, or a doctor to make a diagnosis, but a scientist using the same technology in a similar manner must be faking it. You know, to prove there’s no God or something. I’ll have a future post specifically about the technologies and techniques used by these different fields.

The Internet is both a boon and a bane for intelligent, educated people.  

A boon because it has opened new avenues of research and knowledge. It has made the sharing of information so much easier.  

A bane because a proliferation of fearmongering turn otherwise rational people into radical militants. Such people form cliques. They feel smugly exclusive. They deny science while every aspect of their civilized life is due to science! Think of it- if it weren’t for science, we would be at the technological level of chimpanzees!  

Science deniers claim that science is all about money. That’s just more proof that they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s not science that’s after money – it’s corporations who use science to gain their own ends.

Scientists are only interested in making new discoveries, or finding answers to the questions they seek. The majority of scientists are middle class, and would turn down a better paying offer if it meant they had to give up their chosen field.   Of course, that only applies to those who are actually working as a scientist. Scientists are born, not made, but many never went into a field of science because life got in the way.  

One of the things that sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to envision a technology, then make it happen: i.e., do science.

Those who want to deny science need to go live naked in the forest and only eat what can be scavenged. No cooking allowed, because the ability to control fire is a science thing.  

Yes, there are unethical scientists. There are also unethical preachers, teachers, nurses, store owners and random people living in your neighborhood. It’s ridiculous to judge an entire segment of society for the actions of a few.  

I have a very long list of conspiracy and science denial posts to write as I can get to them. Every time I publish a new one, I’ll add a link to the list below.  

The George Washington Quarter: Published 28 May, 2024

Nephilim Giant Ring: Published 26 May, 2024

Right vs Left and Short Memories: Published 04 May, 2024

The Ben Ben Stone: Published 06 Apr, 2024

Oh No! A Solar Eclipse!: Published 01 Mar, 2024

Medical Conspiracy Theories: Published 02 Feb, 2024